After Amazon, Masterobjects Takes Google To Court Over Instant Search Patent
Yesterday, I broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit. The patent-in-suit, US patent no. 7,752,326, describes a method to immediately start showing search results even while a user is still typing his query into the search box – instant search if you will. I and others wondered why Amazon.com was singled o
5 Social Apps That Will Make SXSW More Intimate
Rick Wittenbraker is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Stage One Capital, an early stage and seed investment fund focused on investments in Internet, mobile, social media, software, and new technology sectors. Rick has lived in Austin for over six years and previously while attending the University of Texas.As a die-hard Austinite, I have a particularly close interest in SXSW every year. It’s
Amazon.com Slammed With Lawsuit Over Instant Search Patent
When you go to Amazon.com and start typing in the top search box, you will automatically see a number of search suggestions for items on sale before you finish typing your query. The company also offers such enhanced search capabilities via browser add-ons and toolbars as well as its mobile applications for the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. MasterObjects, which offers AJAX and Flash-based so
5 Ways To Integrate Technology Into Your Child’s Education
Jeff Galinovsky is regional manager for Intel’s classmate PC in North America where he focuses on expanding education products as well as building an education ecosystem. You can follow him on Twitter at @ClassmatePCDude.Most of us didn’t have today’s technology options when we were in school, so while parents realize technology has become an integral part of their child’s education, they’re so
Get a Job in Social Media, Marketing or Web Development Today
If you’re seeking a job in social media, we’d like to help out. For starters, Mashable‘s Job Lists section gathers together all of our resource lists, how-tos and expert guides to help you get hired. In particular, you might want to see our articles on How to Leverage Social Media for Career Success and How to Find a Job on Twitter.But we’d like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable‘s jo
80+ Can’t Miss Things To See & Do at SXSW 2011
Amy Webb is the CEO of Webbmedia Group, an award-winning digital strategy agency that advises Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, media organizations, foundations, governments, universities and other groups around the world. She is also the founder of Knowledgewebb.net, a membership website for personalized training in digital media. Twitter: @webbmedia. Plancast: @webbmedia.This week kicks
The @Font-Face Rule And Useful Web Font Tricks
The possibility of embedding any font you like into websites via @font-face is an additional stylistic device which promises to abolish the monotony of the usual system fonts. It surely would be all too easy if there was only one Web font format out there. Instead, there’s quite a variety, as you will get to know in this article.This quick introduction to @font-face will lead you towards a gui
5 Innovative Mobile Marketing Campaigns
The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. Learn more.Mobile is an area of intense fascination for marketers and advertisers, partially because it’s so confounding.Ideally, mobile marketing can be eve
Adobe outs experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool, calls it Wallaby
Ah, if only we could flip a big happy switch and convert all the web's Flash content into (functional) HTML5 code. It's a dream shared by many and, funnily enough, the company pushing to make it a reality is none other than Adobe itself, the owner and proprietor of Flash. Its Labs research team has just released an experimental new dev tool, dubbed Wallaby, that's targeted at taking Flash-encoded
Rdio for Mac Feels Like iTunes in the Cloud
Subscription music service Rdio released a brand new native app for Mac OS X on Monday. The app brings the full Rdio experience — including music playback, playlist creation, sharing and mobile syncing — to Mac OS X without the need for the web browser.The app, which is different from the older Adobe Air application (the Air app is still available for Windows users), has a slick interface and b
The Coolest Tech Tour Ever: A Look At How SRI Is Augmenting The Human Condition
Editor’s note: the following is a guest post by Robert Scoble, who studies tech startups and innovators for Rackspace Hosting. His videos usually go up on Rackspace’s Building43. In the post he shares a tour he recently got of SRI International, the Silicon Valley R&D lab where the computer mouse was invented. It also has played a role in many other things, from Disneyland to Polaris Missiles
Why Silicon Valley Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Returning Home
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last month to meet immigrant entrepreneurs. At Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, he met with a dozen of them. More than half said that they might be forced to return to their home countries. That’s because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had. Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from
Microsoft Begs Users To Stop Using IE 6
Like the rest of us, Microsoft is ready to move beyond Internet Explorer 6. The software giant has launched a new website, The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown, that bears the slogan: “Moving the world off Internet Explorer 6.”Here at Mashable, we’ve written at length about the problems created by the continued usage of IE 6. With the exception of specialized corporate/government environments and
In Search Of The Perfect CAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs, or Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, exist to ensure that user input has not been generated by a computer. These peculiar puzzles are commonly used on the Web to protect registration and comment forms from spam. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about CAPTCHAs. They have annoyed me on many occasions, but I’ve also implemented them as quick
Energy Efficiency Measures Saved AT&T $44 Million In 2010
Telecommunications giant AT&T announced the results of its 2010 energy efficiency efforts today. According to the company’s own report, it saw $44 million in annualized energy savings as a result of implementing 4,200 energy efficiency projects at its facilities last year. These included familiar technologies that, pervasively applied, made a big difference, like: Swapping incandescent ligh
Opera browser gets an over-17 rating in Mac App Store, reacts in good humor
You might not yet be aware of this, but Apple's policy towards web browsers is to treat the entire internet as their content. As a result, all browsers on the iOS App Store come with a minimum age requirement of 17 and the same rule will apply to them on the Mac App Store. Opera, the first non-native web explorer to make it in Apple's new desktop app repository, is taking a humorous approach to t
Andreessen Horowitz Finally Adds A Fourth General Partner, Scott Weiss
The firm is keeping the name, but Andreessen Horowitz is officially no longer just the Ben and Marc show. It has added a fourth general partner (the third was John O’Farrell), and astoundingly, he didn’t come from Opsware. The new dealmaker is Scott Weiss, an experienced entrepreneur who may not be a household name, but like Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen has serious entrepreneurial chops, havin
Drund Gives Devs & Users All-in-One Tool for Connected Devices
Dev shop Azork launched Monday Drund, a broad, agnostic development and management platform for apps across all connected devices and browsers.The platform also has an aspect for users, allowing them to “manage their online life from any Internet connected device,” according to a release.Cross-platform development, especially in the mobile sector, is something of a rare and difficult promise to
Intel Closes $7.68 Billion McAfee Acquisition
Intel has officially completed its acquisition of security giant McAfee, according to a release issued today. Intel announced the $7.68 billion, all-cash deal last August. According to the release, McAfee will continue developing and selling security products and services under its own brand and “first fruits of their strategic partnership” will be brought to market later in 2011. McAfee will rep
Humans Are The Routers
Editor’s note: Guest author Shervin Pishevar is the founder of the OpenMesh Project, SGN and an active angel investor. On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy.
Let’s Calm Down On The Google-ITA Deal
This guest post is written by Daniel A. Crane, who is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He is an expert in antitrust law. Google’s proposed acquisition of ITA Software, which provides a management system for airfare pricing and shopping services, has become ground zero for the burgeoning coalition of interests intent on stopping Google’s perceived dominance in Internet s
My Message To Google: Stop Cheating
In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim’s brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime to establish political transparency in Egypt. “We are very, very proud of what Wael and that group was able to do in Egypt,” Schmidt said in Barcelona. But what Schmidt needs to do now is apply G
The Future of the Connected Car
Most of us who watched Knight Rider as a kid expected that by 2011 we would be driving sleek, self-aware cars like KITT — cars that would take us seamlessly from A to B while cracking witty one-liners.Though that future has not yet come to pass, things are starting to get exciting in the in-car technology space. Connected cars are hitting the consumer market in a price bracket that makes them a
The Future of Your Wireless Home Network
David Henry is a senior director of product marketing for NETGEAR where he works on high performance, dependable and easy home networking, storage and digital media products to connect people with the Internet and their content and devices. You can follow NETGEAR on Twitter @NETGEAR.The future of home networking will see multiple devices connected to the Internet and to each other. At the 2011
Xbox Kinect Vs. Sony PS3: How 2 Companies Handle Hacking
Imagine you’re a gaming console manufacturer, and some kid hacks your console to do “neat tricks.” Do you help him or sue him?The question isn’t a hypothetical one; currently, two rival companies have each taken one of these roads. What remains to be seen is which approach will be more profitable, both financially and in terms of gamer goodwill.Microsoft is set to release a Kinect software deve
Mashable Weekend Recap: 16 Stories You May Have Missed
This weekend was on the tail end of a full moon, so maybe that explains its unusual nature. Missed it? Hey, we’ll catch you up right here.A “hacktivist” group called “Anonymous” seemed to have threatened a fringe hate group calling itself a church, and then denied it. Libya shut down its Internet and then restored it. We found a PC that’s great for what it doesn’t do (make noise), and reviewed
Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?
The Q&A land rush is on. Quora, of course, has been hyped to the moon, and not without reason. Fortune magazine recently profiled five more Q&A sites, and three new ones just launched: Cloudy, where your friends answer your questions via SMS; InboxQ, Q&A on Twitter; and Setlr1, which is like Twitter for yes/no questions. Is this a bubble full of copycats doomed to wither into Yahoo A